Edvige Giunta (born 1959) is a Sicilian-American writer, educator, and literary critic.
Biography
She was born in Gela, Sicily, in 1959, the second of four children of Vincenzo and Cettina Giunta, both schoolteachers. After earning a degree in foreign languages and literature at the University of Catania in 1983, she moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the University of Miami. She received a master's degree in English in 1987 and a Ph.D. in 1989. She wrote her dissertation on James Joyce[1] and her first book was titled A Raven Like a Writing-Desk: Lewis Carroll through James Joyce's Looking Glass.[2]
In 1991 she moved to New York. She taught for a time at Union College, later becoming a Professor of English at New Jersey City University. She organized a program on female Italian-American writers at the City University of New York in 1995, and co-founded the Collective of Italian American Women in 1998.[1] She has written extensively on Italian-American women's literature, and her articles, memoir, and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.[3] She also teaches memoir workshops.[4]
Her awards include the NJCU Distinguished Faculty Award (2012), the Esposito Visiting Faculty Fellowship from UMass Dartmouth (2010), the OSIA Book Club Selection for Italian American Writers on New Jersey (2004), and the Educator of the Year Award for the Higher Education Category from the Association of Italian
American Educators (2003).[5]
In 2022, she and Mary Anne Trasciatti of the Triangle Fire Coalition,[6] published Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The book contains nineteen essays that document the 25 March 1911 fire that killed 146 (mostly female) workers in Manhattan's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.[7]
